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Tolstoy. Time. PBS. Galworthy. (enjoy!)
"What Is Art?"
(selected excerpts)
CHAPTER FIVE
#1. In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man.
#2. Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.
#3. Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means of intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.
#4. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena.
#5. And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man's expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.
#6. If a man infects another or others directly, immediately, by his appearance or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering - that does not amount to art.
#7. Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer.
#8. The feelings with which the artist infects others may be most various - very strong or very weak, very important or very insignificant, very bad or very good: feelings of love for one's own country, self-devotion and submission to fate or to God expressed in a drama, raptures of lovers described in a novel, feelings of voluptuousness expressed in a picture, courage expressed in a triumphal march, merriment evoked by a dance, humor evoked by a funny story, the feeling of quietness transmitted by an evening landscape or by a lullaby, or the feeling of admiration evoked by a beautiful arabesque - it is all art.
#9. If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.
#10. To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.
#11. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
#12. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity. #13. As, thanks to man's capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others.
#14. If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kaspar Hauser. #15. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people might be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.
#16. And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.
#17. We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.
#18. This special importance has always been given by all men to that part of this activity which transmits feelings flowing from their religious perception, and this small part of art they have specifically called art, attaching to it the full meaning of the word.
#19. That was how man of old -- Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle - looked on art. Thus did the Hebrew prophets and the ancient Christians regard art; thus it was, and still is, understood by the Mohammedans, and thus it still is understood by religious folk among our own peasantry.
#20. Some teachers of mankind - as Plato in his Republic and people such as the primitive Christians, the strict Mohammedans, and the Buddhists -- have gone so far as to repudiate all art.
#21. People viewing art in this way (in contradiction to the prevalent view of today which regards any art as good if only it affords pleasure) considered, and consider, that art (as contrasted with speech, which need not be listened to) is so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art.
#22. Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. But not less wrong are the people of civilized European society of our class and day in favoring any art if it but serves beauty, i.e., gives people pleasure.
#23. Formerly people feared lest among the works of art there might chance to be some causing corruption, and they prohibited art altogether. Now they only fear lest they should be deprived of any enjoyment art can afford, and patronize any art. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
#24. Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about the art of our society, it is, therefore, first of all necessary to distinguish art from counterfeit art.
#25. There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art. And however poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who are also infected by it).
#26. It is true that this indication is an internal one, and that there are people who have forgotten what the action of real art is, who expect something else form art (in our society the great majority are in this state), and that therefore such people may mistake for this aesthetic feeling the feeling of diversion and a certain excitement which they receive from counterfeits of art. But though it is impossible to undeceive these people, just as it is impossible to convince a man suffering from "Daltonism" [a type of color blindness] that green is not red, yet, for all that, this indication remains perfectly definite to those whose feeling for art is neither perverted nor atrophied, and it clearly distinguishes the feeling produced by art from all other feelings. #27. The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else's - as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist - not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.
#28. If a man is infected by the author's condition of soul, if he feels this emotion and this union with others, then the object which has effected this is art; but if there be no such infection, if there be not this union with the author and with others who are moved by the same work - then it is not art. And not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.
#29. The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art, speaking now apart from its subject matter, i.e., not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.
#30. And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends on three conditions:
1. On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted;
2. on the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted;
3. on the sincerity of the artist, i.e., on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emotion he transmits.
#31. The more individual the feeling transmitted the more strongly does it act on the receiver; the more individual the state of soul into which he is transferred, the more pleasure does the receiver obtain, and therefore the more readily and strongly does he join in it.
#32. The clearness of expression assists infection because the receiver, who mingles in consciousness with the author, is the better satisfied the more clearly the feeling is transmitted, which, as it seems to him, he has long known and felt, and for which he has only now found expression.
#33. But most of all is the degree of infectiousness of art increased by the degree of sincerity in the artist. As soon as the spectator, hearer, or reader feels that the artist is infected by his own production, and writes, sings, or plays for himself, and not merely to act on others, this mental condition of the artist infects the receiver; and contrariwise, as soon as the spectator, reader, or hearer feels that the author is not writing, singing, or playing for his own satisfaction - does not himself feel what he wishes to express - but is doing it for him, the receiver, a resistance immediately springs up, and the most individual and the newest feelings and the cleverest technique not only fail to produce any infection but actually repel.
#34. I have mentioned three conditions of contagiousness in art, but they may be all summed up into one, the last, sincerity, i.e., that the artist should be impelled by an inner need to express his feeling. That condition includes the first; for if the artist is sincere he will express the feeling as he experienced it. And as each man is different from everyone else, his feeling will be individual for everyone else; and the more individual it is - the more the artist has drawn it from the depths of his nature - the more sympathetic and sincere will it be. And this same sincerity will impel the artist to find a clear expression of the feeling which he wishes to transmit.
#35. Therefore this third condition - sincerity - is the most important of the three. It is always complied with in peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so powerfully; but it is a condition almost entirely absent from our upper-class art, which is continually produced by artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness or vanity.
#36. Such are the three conditions which divide art from its counterfeits, and which also decide the quality of every work of art apart from its subject matter.
#37. The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a work form the category of art and relegates it to that of art's counterfeits. If the work does not transmit the artist's peculiarity of feeling and is therefore not individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it has not proceeded from the author's inner need for expression - it is not a work of art. If all these conditions are present, even in the smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of art.
#38. The presence in various degrees of these three conditions - individuality, clearness, and sincerity - decides the merit of a work of art as art, apart from subject matter. All works of art take rank of merit according to the degree in which they fulfill the first, the second, and the third of these conditions. In one the individuality of the feeling transmitted may predominate; in another, clearness of expression; in a third, sincerity; while a fourth may have sincerity and individuality but be deficient in clearness; a fifth, individuality and clearness but less sincerity; and so forth, in all possible degrees and combinations.
#39. Thus is art divided from that which is not art, and thus is the quality of art as art decided, independently of its subject matter, i.e., apart from whether the feelings it transmits are good or bad.
#40. But how are we to define good and bad art with reference to its subject matter?
TIME MAGAZINE Essay: WHAT IS ART TODAY?
Friday, Jan. 27, 1967
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.—André Malraux What images? Among those currently proffered to the public for contemplation: a series of six, large, identically white pictures by Walter de Maria differing only in that on one the artist has written in pencil the word Sky, on another River, on a third Mountain. Four packing-case-sized and identical boxes by Robert Morris, painted white and spaced at equal intervals on the floor. A row of what appears to be eight truncated shoeboxes, the work of James Seawright, each containing a variant of the figure eight in sometimes flashing lights, while every now and then a taped voice croaks out, "Eight." A flight of wooden stairs covered in gold-colored carpet, entitled Euclid by Joe Goode. A creation called Die by Architect-turned-Sculptor Tony Smith, which he admits he ordered by phone. And why not?It is only a six-by-six-by-six-foot cube in slab metal—a piece of art on which the artist has not laid a hand. These are examples of the latest in "minimal" art. The present art scene offers other creations: paintings that are an eye-blinding dazzle of stripes; canvases that are cantilevered from the wall right over the living-room sofa; gadgets that jiggle, wiggle, writhe and spin. And, though it is past its peak, there is pop: an assemblage in which a real lawnmower leans against a painted canvas; Brillo boxes designed to look exactly like Brillo boxes; cartoons blown up to mural size, complete with dialogue balloons and lithographic dots; old bits of crumpled automobiles presented as sculpture; an old Savarin coffee can containing 18 brushes in turpentine and frozen in ineffable permanency. Sometimes the subjects are erotic. Edward Kienholz's plaster couple makes love in the back seat of a real, if dismembered, car. Larry Rivers' seven-foot, three-faced Negro in plywood achieves vivid connection with a complaisant friend by way of a flashing light bulb. A disembodied female breast by Tom Wesselman looms, big as a mountain, over a diminished seashore. Are these images sufficiently powerful to deny man's nothingness? All are declared to be art by the museums that show them, by the critics who explain and hail them, by the collectors who buy them. This has its advantages over the old days when the young artist suffered from neglect and sometimes died unrecognized. But in this day when the most radical young artist is threatened not by neglect but by the possibility that he may be considered over the hill at 30, a few critics and some painters who themselves were radical only a few styles back are beginning to raise an old question: What is art? They are worried not so much by the extravagance of some objects that are accepted as art as by the fact that there seem to be no criteria, no opposition, not even an insistence on the artist's uniqueness or individuality—the very claim that used to animate artistic revolutions. More and more people are beginning to feel that the current state of art, as Robert Frost said of free verse, is like playing tennis without a net.
Broken Illusion
The net has always seemed solid only to those who, with Plato, considered art to be the imitation of nature. The classic anecdote of the triumph of art as artifice concerned Zeuxis: when he unveiled his painting of grapes, birds flew down to peck at them. What the anecdotists seldom added is that Zeuxis' rival won the contest, for when the judges turned to unveil his painting, they were stunned to discover that the veil itself was the painting and declared him the winner because he had fooled the judges, while Zeuxis had fooled only birds. Actually, mimesis as a theory of art was an illusion, invented by a beholder for other beholders. The artists themselves always knew that they were exaggerating, distorting, filtering—to express worship of the divine or a view of man, to make the real more real. But whether the emphasis was moralistic (said Tolstoi: "Art is the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings"), or emotional (Ruskin: "The first universal characteristic of art is tenderness"), or esthetic (Baudelaire: art is "the study of the beautiful"), or hedonistic (Santayana: "The value of art lies in making people happy"), the theory of art as imitation held on. It was finally destroyed in the 1880s—partly because of the appearance of the camera, which copied nature so much more accurately than could any human hand. Artists began to talk of a painting as "an object" in itself rather than the representation of something else. "A painting—before being a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order," said one painter-polemicist, Maurice Denis, in 1890. Thus began the rapid but epic evolution in which representation was first blurred, then distorted, then broken into fragments and finally disappeared altogether in abstraction. The artists arrogated to themselves (as did the poets at the same time) the right to say what art was, with the added inference that if the viewer (or reader) did not understand it, that was his fault. "It was as if suddenly," says Painter Robert Motherwell, "an established church had dissolved. Each artist became his own self-ordained priest, charged with deciding for himself such questions as what is god or what is sin." The New Church
It was an exhilarating experience. But inevitably, within a few years a new church was established. Says Artist Saul Steinberg: "This church has its saints, who are accepted only after they are dead. We have the holy bones of Mondriaan and the miraculous blood ofSoutine. This church has its martyrs, like Jackson Pollock. It has its bishops and cardinals—the critics and museum directors. The museums have encouraged the production of icons, holy images, and other good luck charms that have no artistic value outside the church." The church also has its missionaries—the dealers. Among the leading ones right now is Manhattan's Leo Castelli. A few years ago, the story goes, Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning remarked, "That son of a bitch Castelli, he has the nerve to sell anything. He could even sell beer cans." Whereupon Jasper Johns proceeded to create his famous pop-art beer cans. Since the emergence of pop, with its move back to representation, abstraction has ceased to be the absolute dogma of the artistic church, whose chief theology today is the "reality theory." This theory of art as an object turns every object into potential art. As one philosopher, Columbia Professor Arthur C. Danto, admits: "What in the end makes Rauschenberg's real beds streaked with paint and Warhol's Brillo boxes art is the theory. Without the theory, one is unlikely to see them as art." This does not satisfy all the critics. Says the Observer's Nigel Gosling: "Take a table and put it into a gallery, then it's art. But take eight of them and put them into a gallery, then it's a restaurant." What then is art? The modern sages offer no solid answers. Says Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art: "It is an expression of individual sensibilities. A neon Coca-Cola sign is in a very real sense a piece of art. The fact that anyone could make it is more or less beside the point. The fact is that no one else did make it." Says the Museum of Modern Art's Alfred Barr, who is viewed by many as the untiaraed pope of the modern art world: "It is folly to say what is art. Works can become art by fiat —sometimes the fiat of one man. And it can be art for a while and then not art. It's obvious today that comics are art. Just because these things are vulgar, doesn't mean they are not art." Says the former director of the Tate Gallery, Sir John Rothenstein: "Art derives from the intention of the artist. But time is the only impeccable judge."
The necessity for considering the artist's intent and personality is the only common note that modern opinion strikes. It is a doctrine that brings art criticism down to the plane of psychoanalysis. The principle was perhaps pushed to its extreme by Peggy Guggenheim, who has admitted that she was not much impressed by Jackson Pollock as a painter until the day he urinated in her fireplace. Meaning in Meaninglessness
The situation has produced a new kind of patron. "Most collectors today are not just satisfied with buying art, they want to buy a piece of the artist as well," grumbles one dissenter. "They want to belong to the art world, go see dirty movies at night at Andy Warhol's apartment." And Warhol in turn becomes a feature of gossip columns and a fixture at society's tables. Any day now he may be wrapped in plaster by the plaster master, George Segal, and propped against the bar in somebody's penthouse.
The situation has also produced a new breed of critics whose function is not to enunciate or defend standards but to be explicators and publicists for the new. Rothenstein, once a champion of innovation himself, now complains: "Scarcely anything, when it is quite new, however manifestly idiotic, is forthrightly condemned." Small wonder. Past critics were thoroughly cowed and browbeaten, not unjustly, for their classic misjudgments, beginning with the scorn heaped on Manet's Olympia and culminating in the ridicule showered on the impressionists, the Fauves and the cubists. Critics now live in terror of seeming square. The trouble is, as one anticritic remarked, they are now saying more and more about less and less. That includes some museum officials who are critics as well. Describing a box byRichard Artschwager, Ralph T. Coe of Kansas City's Nelson Gallery wrote: "The cheeselike surface of his formica triptych opens to reveal—absolutely nothing. This work reaches clear into the unlimited recesses of the mind: recesses that could frighten." Sam Hunter, critic and director of Manhattan's Jewish Museum, commented on a work by Barnett Newman, maximum leader of the minimalists; it was a large canvas, all red except for four thread-thin vertical stripes. Wrote Hunter: "These fragile and oscillating stripes play tricks on the eye and the mind by their alternate compliance and aggression. Brilliantly visible and all but subliminally lost . . . their cunning equivocation quite subverts the concepts of division and geometric partition." Sarah Lawrence Professor William Rubin said of Jasper Johns: "For him the image is meaningful in its meaninglessness." The artists themselves do their bit. Painter Ad Reinhardt, who has so "refined" his paintings that they are currently all the same size and all look absolutely black until sufficient staring reveals an invariable cross of rectangles, is wont to make such statements as: "There is no place in art for life . . . the one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness." "Esthetics is to art what ornithology is to the birds," quips Barnett Newman. On the contrary, too many modern painters seem to listen first and paint afterward, to be guided by the art theory of others rather than an art instinct of their own. The turnover is so fast that a style is lucky to last more than a couple of years before it is pronounced dead by the critics. With such a declaration, many a collector decides that he had better unload, prices decline, and artists get despondent. More in anger than in jest, Painter Jimmy Ernst ticked off an "unhappy proliferation" of present and possibly future styles: "Op and pop, sop (soft-edge-optical), plop-plop (from catsup bottles), abrev (abstract revisionism), exab (express-abstraction), geopimp (geometric-post-impressionism), kipab (kinetic-post-abstraction),syncromesh (easy to shift), nero (new eroticism), and perhaps even esthex (esthetic experiments between consenting adults in the privacy of their home). All this provides no answer to the question, what is art? The artists' own attitude in general is a questioning, as in science, rather than an affirmation, as in humanism. Being heretics with no common cause, rebelling against a permissive society with no settled faith of its own, they often seem driven into intellectual dead ends or fragmented tantrums of defiance, fighting unseen gusts that are perhaps not there. It is hard to be different among crowds of other people trying to be different. In the Dada decade, Marcel Duchamp could shock people by exhibiting a urinal turned upside down and calling it Fountain. Seeing it for the first time today, hardly anvone would flinch—although a few might try to flush. If art no longer shocks, it seldom edifies. Gone is the romantic reverence that made a work of art an object of worship; now it is apt to be just a household object, a neatly executed artifact. Is that enough? "If a painting does not make a human contact, it is nothing," saysMotherwell. "The audience also is responsible. Through pictures, our passions touch; therefore painting is the fulfillment of a deep human necessity, not a production of a handmade commodity. A painting, or a man, is neither a decoration nor an anecdote."
Duty to Judge
Perhaps the best thing about all the decorations and anecdotes that clutter the scene is a sense of humor, a sense of freedom, a suspicion that anything can happen—perhaps even passion. In this welter of the current art world, it is still possible to say, or sense, that some things are good, some bad. There is the almost haunting fact that one metal glob or set of blinking lights will somehow tug at the imagination, while another will not. That Savarin coffee can full of paint brushes, which is in the Museum of Modern Art at the moment, is a visual bore. But Rauschenberg's goat with a tire around it is somehow amusing. Kienholz's latest exhibit, an abortionist's chair, complete with curette, bloody rags and fetus, has some horrid documentary interest, even if it need not be confused with El Greco's best work. Tony Smith's huge constructions have a presence (even if they are ordered by phone) that a pile of concrete blocks by Carl Andre have not. Something called Liaison, by John Bennett, has some strange charm, looming like a cross between an oversized scuba diver and a mechanical caricature of an elephant (though it's hard to see in what corner of the living room it would fit). But there is no such justification for those Euclid stairs; even as a literary joke, they are not worth the floor space they occupy, and someone ought to have the energy to say so. George Segal's plaster figures, produced by the ostensibly simple method of wrapping a subject in plaster-soaked rags, are unaccountably melancholy and powerful. Why? Modern esthetics sayeth not. Yet it is that "why" to which today's art viewer must cling for dear life. It may be futile to insist any longer that one thing is art and another is not. Let everything be called art. But if so, it is more necessary than ever, in a time when to mention beauty has become a gaucherie, to decide that one work but not another has authority; that this one but not that one expands the senses or compels the imagination. The gallerygoer cannot stop the tastemaker from talking. But he can stop listening quite so docilely. Ultimately, art can be of value to him or to posterity only if it somehow enhances his own awareness of the world—by sight, touch or emotion—but it has to be his own decision. He has a duty to look long, learn and then judge, to like or not to like. He may make hideous mistakes. That is his risk—too few people take it—and better than abdicating personal reaction in favor of fashionable theory. For time, as today's uncertain men agree, is the only final judge; and the live viewer with his feet aching is the first voter in a poll whose results he may never know.
In the end, André Malraux expects too much when he asks for images to deny man's nothingness; that is turning art into religion. But if art need not deny the nothingness of man, it is urgent for man to deny the nothingness of art.
Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is that which excites the greatest impersonal emotion in an hypothecated perfect human being.
Impersonal emotion! And what -- I thought do I mean by that? Surely I mean: That is not Art, which, while I, am contemplating it, inspires me with any active or directive impulse; that is Art, when, for however brief a moment, it replaces within me interest in myself by interest in itself. For, let me suppose myself in the presence of a carved marble bath. If my thoughts be "What could I buy that for?" Impulse of acquisition; or: "From what quarry did it come?" Impulse of inquiry; or: "Which would be the right end for my head?" Mixed impulse of inquiry and acquisition -- I am at that moment insensible to it as a work of Art. But, if I stand before it vibrating at sight of its colour and forms, if ever so little and for ever so short a time, unhaunted by any definite practical thought or impulse -- to that extent and for that moment it has stolen me away out of myself and put itself there instead; has linked me to the universal by making me forget the individual in me. And for that moment, and only while that moment lasts, it is to me a work of Art. The word "impersonal," then, is but used in this my definition to signify momentary forgetfulness of one's own personality and its active wants.
So Art -- I thought -- is that which, heard, read, or looked on, while producing no directive impulse, warms one with unconscious vibration. Nor can I imagine any means of defining what is the greatest Art, without hypothecating a perfect human being. But since we shall never see, or know if we do see, that desirable creature -- dogmatism is banished, "Academy" is dead to the discussion, deader than even Tolstoy left it after his famous treatise "What is Art?" For, having destroyed all the old Judges and Academies, Tolstoy, by saying that the greatest Art was that which appealed to the greatest number of living human beings, raised up the masses of mankind to be a definite new Judge or Academy, as tyrannical and narrow as ever were those whom he had destroyed.
This, at all events -- I thought is as far as I dare go in defining what Art is. But let me try to make plain to myself what is the essential quality that gives to Art the power of exciting this unconscious vibration, this impersonal emotion. It has been called Beauty! An awkward word -- a perpetual begging of the question; too current in use, too ambiguous altogether; now too narrow, now too wide -- a word, in fact, too glib to know at all what it means. And how dangerous a word -- often misleading us into slabbing with extraneous floridities what would otherwise, on its own plane, be Art! To be decorative where decoration is not suitable, to be lyrical where lyricism is out of place, is assuredly to spoil Art, not to achieve it. But this essential quality of Art has also, and more happily, been called Rhythm. And, what is Rhythm if not that mysterious harmony between part and part, and part and whole, which gives what is called life; that exact proportion, the mystery of which is best grasped in observing how life leaves an animate creature when the essential relation of part to whole has been sufficiently disturbed. And I agree that this rhythmic relation of part to part, and part to whole -- in short, vitality -- is the one quality inseparable from a work of Art. For nothing which does not seem to a man possessed of this rhythmic vitality, can ever steal him out of himself.
And having got thus far in my thoughts, I paused, watching the swallows; for they seemed to me the symbol, in their swift, sure curvetting, all daring and balance and surprise, of the delicate poise and motion of Art, that visits no two men alike, in a world where no two things of all the things there be, are quite the same.
Yes -- I thought -- and this Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement. The active amusements and relaxations of life can only rest certain of our faculties, by indulging others; the whole self is never rested save through that unconsciousness of self, which comes through rapt contemplation of Nature or of Art.
And suddenly I remembered that some believe that Art does not produce unconsciousness of self, but rather very vivid self-realisation.
Ah! but -- I though -- that is not the first and instant effect of Art; the new impetus is the after effect of that momentary replacement of oneself by the self of the work before us; it is surely the result of that brief span of enlargement, enfranchisement, and rest.
Yes, Art is the great and universal refreshment. For Art is never dogmatic; holds no brief for itself you may take it or you may leave it. It does not force itself rudely where it is not wanted. It is reverent to all tempers, to all points of view. But it is wilful -- the very wind in the comings and goings of its influence, an uncapturable fugitive, visiting our hearts at vagrant, sweet moments; since we often stand even before the greatest works of Art without being able quite to lose ourselves! That restful oblivion comes, we never quite know when -- and it is gone! But when it comes, it is a spirit hovering with cool wings, blessing us from least to greatest, according to our powers; a spirit deathless and varied as human life itself.
--John Galsworthy (1867-1933).
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May 17, 2001
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Essayist Roger Rosenblatt tackles the question "What is art?"
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ROGER ROSENBLATT: There's an exhibition of Vermeer paintings in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art that contains a painting about the art of painting and, incidentally, about the art of everything else. In what he called "The Art of Painting," the artist, presumably Vermeer, himself, sits with his back to us as he paints a model dressed up as Cleo, the Muse of history. The model wears a laurel crown to indicate honor and glory. And she holds a trumpet to indicate fame. This is how the artist would like to paint her, posed as Cleo, the most important of all the muses in all her musey grandeur and formality. But the model in Vermeer's painting is not posing like a muse, rather, being human, she is holding the trumpet casually, carelessly. The laurel crown looks askew and she is glancing down at a crumpled piece of paper, clearly distracted. She is not what the artist wants to see but she is better than that by being herself. "The Art of Painting" then is the art of seeing what is there, not what one wishes to be there in some heightened form. This, it might be said, is the art of everything. The art of everything is to make one see what is present and real, rather than what one wishes to be monumental and ideal. The artist who seeks the ideal representation of things is likely to look in the wrong direction -- an effort to get the grand picture, he'll miss the great one. Which is of greater beauty - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the crowd of ordinary people seated on the stone steps outside the museum? It is not simply a matter of catching the small stuff. It's about being alert to the non-ideal, the imperfect, to the accidental gesture, the distracted gaze, to the pose that is not a pose. To be alert to the emotion of the continuum, rather than to search out the single lofty moment - one needs to look in the wrong direction to find the right direction. This is the basis of nearly every detective story. The authors of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple and Quaro - Perry Mason and Wolfe - deliberately lead us in the wrong direction to delight us with the right one. It is the basis of photography especially. Of all the billions of moments that pass before the camera's lens only one is a work of art. And that's the one no one was looking for. The Famous Family of Man exhibition of photographs in the 1950s focused almost exclusively on the caught moment, not on formally family portraits. The idea was that the family of man was a state of confusion to be represented in all its accidental magnificence. In a way, Vermeer's "The Art of Painting" is a photograph of the right event before he might have painted the wrong one. This work is the only one of his paintings he ever kept for himself…perhaps because it contained a lesson he felt he ought to teach himself repeatedly. The great folded curtain at the left of the painting could be where Vermeer enters his own work to look in upon himself and offer a correction. Again and again, to remind the artist to look for the eternal in the evanescence and not to wish life be better than it is because it's better as it is. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. |
